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A stock price of $207.05 or greater would have nudged Apple over the finish line in the race to one trillion

Amazon had also been fast approaching the threshold

Apple hit a $1 trillion market cap on Thursday, making the iPhone maker the first publicly traded U.S. company to reach the record valuation.

The stock rose nearly 3 percent following a strong third-quarter earnings report earlier this week, briefly hitting a session high of $207.05 in midday trading before falling back below $207.

Based on a recently adjusted outstanding share count of 4,829,926,000 shares, a stock price of $207.05 or greater would have nudged Apple over the finish line in the race to one trillion. Investors had previously been looking for a share price of $203.45, but the company's hefty stock buybacks moved the threshold higher.

"I think it just speaks to just how powerful the Apple ecosystem has become over the last few decades," GBH Insights analyst Dan Ives told CNBC after the historic market move. "This is not the end, that they hit $1 trillion. I view this as just kind of speaking to a new a stage of growth and profitability."

Ives credited the company's growing and software and services revenue with driving the valuation. The catch-all category — which includes the App Store, Apple Care, Apple Pay, iTunes and cloud services — posted record quarterly revenue of $9.55 billion for the June quarter.

"It just speaks to the vision that [co-founder Steve Jobs] and now [CEO Tim Cook] have had in making sure Apple isn't just a hardware company," Ives said.